Saudi crown prince secretly lobbied Trump to attack Iran

Saudi Arabia joined Israel in lobbying the US to launch strikes against Iran.

Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, argued in favour of an attack during multiple phone calls with US President Donald Trump in the past month, sources told The Washington Post.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also continued his long-standing campaign urging the US to join strikes on Iran, the Post reported.

Iran has continued its retaliation after the US and Israel launched a barrage of strikes on Saturday morning (Iran time), which killed its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran has so far launched attacks on six of its neighbours, inadvertently uniting the Middle East against the Islamic Republic.

The leaders of Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, previously at loggerheads, spoke on the phone after missiles struck their nations on Saturday.

The Saudi crown prince said that his country was ready “to place all its capabilities” at its neighbour’s disposal, shortly before attacks on Saudi soil were confirmed.

The joint attack on Saturday came despite American intelligence believing that Iran’s military probably posed no threat to the US mainland within the next decade.

Iran retaliated by targeting residential buildings across the region, setting a five-star hotel in Dubai ablaze, hitting a tower block in Bahrain and striking a Kuwaiti airport, which invited further opprobrium.

Many Gulf states will not side with Israel – only Bahrain and the UAE have formal diplomatic ties – but they believe Iran is a destabilising force and a danger to the region.

In his discussions with the US, the Saudi crown prince said Iran would only grow stronger unless the US decided to strike now.

The phone calls to Trump were made despite Saudi officials saying publicly that the country would not allow Saudi airspace to be used in an attack on Iran, reflecting the crown prince’s desire to avoid Iranian retaliatory strikes against his country’s oil infrastructure.

Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, an Emirati political commentator, told The Telegraph that Iran was the unifying threat bringing Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) nations together, “regardless of differences”. He said: “When things get tough, they come together.”

Salman Al-Ansari, a Saudi geopolitical researcher, agreed that despite political differences, Saudi Arabia was united with its Gulf allies. “Riyadh’s security doctrine remains consistent even amid bilateral tensions with the UAE,” he told The Telegraph.

“We must distinguish between principled commitments and bilateral disagreements. Saudi Arabia’s approach to regional security is not transactional but foundational.

“The kingdom has never spared, and will never spare, any effort to safeguard regional stability.

“As the leading pillar of the GCC, Saudi Arabia engaged directly with the leadership of every state targeted by Iran, placing its full political and strategic weight behind their security.”

Saudi foreign policy expert Aziz Alghashian said Iran’s strikes would at least offer the chance to “mitigate tensions” between the UAE and Saudi Arabia, turning friction into co-operation and solidarity.

Alghashian said despite the differences between the UAE and Saudi Arabia over their respective involvements in civil wars in Sudan and Yemen, the two nations had always agreed on their approach to Iran.

Dr Yoel Guzansky, a senior fellow at the Israel National Institute of Security Studies, said all the Gulf states had worked together to dissuade Trump from striking Iran. By attacking them all, Iran would have pushed them closer to the US, he said.

“It’s not just that Iran has united them but [it] may push them towards more co-operation with the US, now they have the legitimacy after being attacked,” Guzansky said.

“Saudi announced its military capabilities are there for the Gulf states, and they also said that when Israel attacked Qatar in September. It’s a sign of solidarity.

“All of them are being attacked apart from Oman, as the mediator in the Iran-US talks.”

Danny Citrinowicz, a former head of Israeli military intelligence and an Iran expert at Israel’s Institute of National Security Studies, said Saudi Arabia and the UAE had been given a unified purpose to end the war, with fears that Iran could attack their tourism sites and critical infrastructure.